the Trask-Hubey debate

[Larry Trask]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, H.M.Hubey wrote:
 
> Any piece of paintwork does not count as painting. The painters have
> their own black magic guild which decides what is art and what is
> not. Does that ring a bell?
 
Nope.  What we try to reconstruct is not individual miscellaneous items,
but rather the whole system of a vanished language, or as much of that
as we can.
 
A proposed reconstruction is accepted by other linguists to the extent
that it (a) is internally coherent and (b) accounts successfully for the
data.  Aesthetic factors like symmetry and economy are not negligible,
but they must take a back seat to our major concern: how well does the
proposed reconstruction account for the data in a principled manner?
 
> I also have very small doubts that I can write a program that can take
> n words from language A, and m from language B and write a program that
> can change one set into the other (at least enough of them to dumbfound
> the skeptics and force them to having N new looks into the "comparative
> method") using only regular sound changes. The only problem is that I
> don't have the time or energy to put into such a useless demonstration.
 
I think "useless" is a very apt description.  No doubt one could write a
cutesy program that would convert, say, a set of English words into Zulu
words, but such activity bears no discoverable resemblance to
comparative reconstruction or to any other aspect of historical
linguistics.
 
 
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
 
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk